Ray Pride

Vince Vaughn's tired before he starts to talk.

But get him going on things he cares about, he's as engaging a talker as you'd expect from his screen persona. Vaughn's taking a Saturday off from the Chicago shoot of "The Break-up," which he's producing and starring in with Jennifer Aniston. Slouching in the hotel room chair, he looks like all he'd like to do is put his six-foot-five legs up on another one. We're talking about "The Wedding Crashers," the smart, charming, dirty-talking, relentlessly funny comedy he stars in with Owen Wilson. They make a winning, genial pair, talking at each other with their diametrically opposed rhythms: Wilson's laconic, reactive persona and Vaughn with his characters' too talky-to-be-a-tic all-ADD ids. But in their R-rated depiction of a pair of thirtysomething juveniles not quite ready to admit they're no longer young, they're alternately tart and sweet, each readily wounded by the other but also attentive enough to the temperature of the room to roll with any curve in their sensation-greedy game. It's an inspired setup: giddy and yet optimistically romantic. Think about it: whenever you go to a wedding, you're playing a role. Everybody but the groom and bride are wedding crashers in a way. There are strong roles across the board, including Christopher Walken as an old-money government official and overbearing father, Rachel McAdams as the woman who snares Wilson's attention, even though she's about to be married, and the wildly over-the-top Isla Fisher as her younger sister, a compulsive redhead who makes filth a most lovely thing. Put all the characters together for a Cape Cod weekend...

If you were a little cynical, you could think the producers started with a counter-programming notion that, as studio pictures grow blander, let's say "fuck" as often and entertainingly as possible. "Naaah," Vaughn says. "With the dialogue, we just would always--I would write and Owen as well--think of funnier things to say. Then on the day, we'd improvise some as well but a lot of the dialogue, we'd written before we got there."

Working with director David Dobkin from a screenplay credited to Steve Faber and Bob Fisher, the pair ran with the classic idea to shoot everything on the page, then cut loose. "A lot of my dating rant was written but then I would go off and do other stuff--" Like your character's explosion to Owen at one wedding when a woman hooks your eye? "She just eye-fucked the shit out of me"? "Yeah, yeah. Anything like that, inappropriate or shocking at a wedding is good. `She eye-fucked the shit out of me!' `Shhh! Shhh!'"

There's an unusually cohesive quality to so many of the scenes, as if, in a good way, the filmmakers had been able to shoot and reshoot until they got it right. The movie's second scene is a gangbusters montage of weddings filled with happy maniac behavior--drink, dancing and far too much cake frosting. "What you want to search for is [a tone that] makes it all seem improvised, that it all just happened in the moment," Vaughn says. "That's the energy you're looking for. But you know, to have it feel that way, you can't go and improvise an entire movie and track a story from beginning to end. The thing that's confusing about improvisation is, if you go and you're just trying to say funny things in the moment, you're going to destroy your movie because you might go off story. It might be funny, but at what great cost? Can you improvise in a way that makes it make sense with the next scene and the next scene? So you really have to be able to keep the scene on point, to how it's intended to serve the story. There's more to it than just, `Hey, what's a fun line to say?'"

Dobkin, Vaughn says, is a director who believes comedy comes out of detail. The end credits have a roster of wedding consultants. Each of the weddings seems to have its own authentic look. "I think that says a lot. Even though it's a comedy, the more you can be real, the more it helps the jokes. It also helps the heart of the story. I know that David really wanted it to be authentic because it makes the crashing `reality' more believable. Because you're going into these weddings with the burden of saying, `okay, I'm trying to get into this reality, to not be caught in this circumstance.'"

Plus your guy likes his cake. "Part of the thing was he liked the girls, obviously, but he loved all the things about weddings. That's what makes them likable, forgivable for their adolescent behavior is that there's a real innocence to it. They're excited. They love to eat, they love to dance, they have a good time! They show the bride and groom a good time. When they cut the cake, they sort of elevate it for everybody, they don't ruin it. There's their optimism, the possibilities of true love. My character is genuinely enthusiastic about the whole experience--drinking, dancing, the different rituals at the different weddings."

"Wedding Crashers" steals your liquor starting Friday.

(2005-07-19)

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